‘I Am Frankelda’ Is a Stop-Motion Fever Dream You’ll Never Want to Wake Up From

In the realm of animation, stop-motion has always comfortably occupied a height where the floor and ceiling of its quality sit so close they practically breathe the same rarefied air by simply existing as a time-consuming, lovingly handcrafted art. That’s just the truth of it. The medium never fails to be mesmerizing. And yet, somehow, I Am Frankelda, Mexico’s first-ever feature-length stop-motion film, manages to punch straight through that already elevated artistic bar, delivering an unrelentingly imaginative, awe-inspiring work of art that’s not just good—it’s downright resplendent.

I Am Frankelda, written and directed by Guillermo del Toro protégés Arturo and Roy Ambriz and animated by Cinema Fantasma, is best described as a gothic, occasionally musical, metanarrative stop-motion animated film that finds the truth in fiction. On a literal level, it’s a 19th-century tale that follows Frankelda (Mireya Mendoza), an aspiring horror author whose light is routinely dimmed by those around her. Things escalate to the fantastical when the monsters she crafts as an escape from her downtrodden reality come to life. Key among them is Herneval (Arturo Mercado Jr.), an owl-like prince living in the realm between dreams and nightmares—a realm that’s slowly coming to ruin.

To save his kingdom, Herneval requires the terrors from Frankelda’s stories to weave new nightmares for those who sleep in the real world and, in turn, keep his world and his noble parents alive (it works on a kind of Monsters Inc. rule, you see). But Frankelda and Herneval’s realm-crossing love story is put to the test as Frankelda fights tooth-and-nail to safeguard her agency as a storyteller from Procustes (Luis Leonardo Suárez), the previous nightmare weaver who seeks to imprison her and pass off her stories as their own.

As you might imagine, it’s hard to succinctly pin down exactly what I Am Frankelda is in a neat string of sentences and feel like you’ve done it artistic justice. Every frame of animation in I Am Frankelda‘s tight 104-minute runtime coaxes wide-eyed wonder—the kind that makes you ask how the artists at Cinema Fantasma even conceived these fantastical ideas, let alone brought them to life in stop-motion. It’s as if they tapped into the transient matter of dreams and wove them into every fiber of the film.

And like any dream, I Am Frankelda drifts between gorgeous and grotesque imagery on a dime, with things like cotton-soft clouds and rivers your mind is tricked into believing look like gentle hands one moment, only to contort into something nightmarish the next, dragging